Some electronic systems may be provided to users on a lease or contract basis. For example, a user may receive the electronic system before the system is completely paid for. While most users will honor the terms of the lease or contract, it may be beneficial to discourage the theft of components or services before the system is paid up. This discouragement of theft or improper tampering with the system may be referred to as hardening.
For example, an electronic system may benefit from hardening against hacking the system, taking components from the system (e.g. for selling in the grey market or using in other systems), switching providers before the contract is fulfilled, and/or cheating the provider by fudging the amount of time used, among other things.
For example, some electronic systems may be hardened by soldering down components (e.g. the processor, chipset, and/or memory components), providing limited expandability (e.g. no PCI slots), using tamper proof screws, using a sealed chassis, employing intrusion detection sensors, using a 6 to 8 layer motherboard (e.g. to cover the traces), and/or epoxying the motherboard surfaces. A problem with these techniques is that they add cost to the manufacturing process (thus increasing the burden on the end users who end up paying more) and they penalize the majority of the users (who are legal, ethical) by limiting the system's capacity and expandability (e.g. the users who are paying in full or have finished the terms of the contract may have limited upgrade ability).